Back in the day games like Entropia Universe and other Real Cash Economy games would hide behind legality of “this is an investment” and yes you could run a business inside, sell services, and get back an ROI on quite an number of things. I sure did in that game.
They also had hunting, crafting, and mining all with a legal set return rate because it was in fact gambling and thus had house edges listed. Yet it was under the "this is an investment" mindset. At one point they even tried to set up their own bank for their digital currency of PED. Which had a fix exchange rate to fiat. Long before there was ever the word cryptocurrency. There were a bunch of games like that without the whole trying become their own bank.
When it comes to items in a game that you can then resell at a later point in time they sure can become an investment. That game had real estate, space ships, gear, weapons, land deeds, shares, player owned shopping centers and so forth. You could also at ANY POINT IN TIME sell the item back to the game for a set value. Which is what most blockchain games are missing. There is no base value the game will trade back for. Where the players are trying to sell to other players for a markup.
The issue with blockchain games is instead of charging an upfront cost just to buy and play the game there an endless amount of microtransactions and pay to win options. In non-blockchain gaming players hate these things and yet they will shell out 1k’s of dollars trying to chase after profit in blockchain games.
We are starting to see Real Cash Economy games just be blockchain games. Frankly most blockchain games out there suck and the masses would not spend like they are if they did not think there was a chance to turn a profit. Most of them never will.
In every game players want to make in game money to trade and buy things. Expect in cryptocurrency you can now legally make real money. Without breaking TOS and selling on even more shady sites. One search of “how to make gold in WoW” on YouTube and you can see farming for gold in that game is huge and most people are not going try and sell for money. They just want it for their own personal use.
Now imagine instead if WoW gold was a cryptocurrency. A big way to make in game gold in WoW is investing your gold into items for: flipping, converting, and other stuff.
Players investing in video games has always been around. There was just very few enter/exit opportunities for fiat to get involved. So most of it was internal and you were investing time and applying game knowledge to acquire and build up that in game wealth for fun and not financial gain. Not spending fait or other currency’s to do so.
Investment is just being used like it has in the past. Most people will never EVER act like a business and are just gambling. Expect they are delusional that they are making “investments.” While one could argue investing is gambling as well. I’ll forgot wanting to think more into that.
Back a couple weeks ago when people were getting huge votes for writing reviews on blockchain games I try to counter with this post. http://enjargames.dblog.org/11-profit-mistakes-people-make-playing-blockchain-games .
I’ve considered not writing about blockchain games or promoting them anymore as something to play for fun. Cryptocurrency has massive FOMA and people keep blowing all their money acting like in 48 hours they will be richer then Warren Buffet.
Yep! I've heard about that @enjar. :)